StarDestroyer.Net BBS

TrailerParkJawa wrote:Gameplay: So far I think this is the hardest of all the series. Im on my third or fourth town in the Region and I have not been able to grow a town above a few thousand residents. I end up getting more demands for services than I can provide. So far Ive tried to stick to an agricultural village with some industry.

My first semi-successful town had industry on the outsides (I heard that half the pollution goes off the map) but all my residential was low and slummy, I had some good industrial buildings however. How do you upload a pic, you surround it with the IMG scr tag, but how do you actually get it to the screen, I could upload it here.And is there a way to check how much water you have cubic centimeters, and how much is actually being used, same with power

Overall I think SimCity 2000 is the best product, but Im happy with my purchase.

yeah, whatever happened to Arcologies, why did they pull them out after simcity 2K? And is there a way to check how much water you have cubic centimeters, and how much is actually being used, same with power

Quoting fix - Phong

As far as I can tell you can only make rough guess' about power and water consumption. You can look at the graphs and see capacity vs. production. What I wish, was when I put my cursor over the line, it would give me an exact number.

A water pump provides 2000 Cubic Feet of water if I recall correctly. Id have to boot up the game and go check. The water model is different from SimCity 2000. You cant increase the amount of water a pump provides by surrounding it with water.

Use the graphs, they'll tell your production and consumption which is good enough. They pump from an aquifer only (unlike SC2K/SC3K which allowed you to pump from surface water sources).

Pumps or towers in SC4 don't have anything to do with actual terrain water. They simply produce their maximum output, even on the top of a mountain.

Unless there's a lot of water pollution, of course.

Of course, in which case they produce zero.

One of the definite improvements that easily beat the older SimCity games is the ability to build stuff on uneven terrain. In SC3k and earlier, non-flat = wasted.

Slartibartfast wrote:One of the definite improvements that easily beat the older SimCity games is the ability to build stuff on uneven terrain. In SC3k and earlier, non-flat = wasted.

Yes, I sorta like and dislike the retaining walls on hilly terrain, but its a nice improvement. I also like the street vs road concept, and think its done well.

I will never forgive them however for not bringing back the signs from SC2000.

How was SC2ooo? I only ot to play the Playstation version

Typhonis 1 wrote:How was SC2ooo? I only ot to play the Playstation version

Well, it came out in 1994 IIRC. It had some features I thought where really cool. Your buildings had an actual value. ( ie $360,000 ) You could put signs in your city that you could read from the zoomed out view. So I could label a freeway "TRAILERPARK EXPRESSWAY" or something like that. There was an annoying bug I remember that could cause too many churches to spring up.

SC2K was probably the best-executed of the SimCity games.

I have the SC2000 Special Edition CD, it had interviews, a program where you could change how the buildings looked and you could place lots of buildings and all kinds of stuff on a map without worrying about money, and other crap.

And there was this one city called 359arco or whatever number was before that, where on one side of the map there was lots and lots of those arcos that launched into space(dont remember the name) and a number of fusion power plants, and what you could do was that you just waited till all of them launched into space, because when they launched you got all the money that they were worth and then you could just start building the city and not worry about money for a many centuries.

After trying three times I may give up on it all I get is a damn error message 31% of the way through and it takes an hour to get that far

By the way you can import a whole region from a grayscale bitmap. Said bitmap can be done by hand or exported by an utility like Terragen.

TrailerParkJawa wrote:I will never forgive them however for not bringing back the signs from SC2000.

Requires expansion pack, tho

Holy Macaroni! Drools.... [/end virtual Homer]

Is that expansion pack free or a purchase. That is cool. Im gonna have to shuttle on over to the EA website. Damn, I dont have any money though. The mortgage is due in 2 weeks.

Slartibartfast wrote:

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi wrote:Once you get into cities with over half a million people, traffic becomes a problem for the resedential areas. I was thinking of solving this by moving resedential out into neighboring cities, but then commute time becomes a problem. Speaking of that, I find the commute times to be unrealistic. If I only had to drive a few miles to work, I'd consider it short, while your Sims consider a commute halfway across town "long".

It's only unrealistic if you live in a country where the 2/3rds of the gas prices are subsidized by the government.

It'd be great if you could handle that sort of thing ... micromanage economics, wrestle with the government and stuff. In fact, you could probably make a small SimNation with the regions.

Bob McDob wrote:

Slartibartfast wrote:It's only unrealistic if you live in a country where the 2/3rds of the gas prices are subsidized by the government.

It'd be great if you could handle that sort of thing ... micromanage economics, wrestle with the government and stuff. In fact, you could probably make a small SimNation with the regions.

You sorta can, with edicts or whatever they're called... not exactly lower gas prices, but there's one that makes people commute farther. So in fact you're spending government money to help people with their commutes.

My region as of a few months ago. Right now, it's up well over 2 million, but I don't feel like grabbing a screenie of it at the moment.

Here's my quick guide to making money:

First city: build near the edge. Run roads to an adjacent city square. Build a water pump, oil plant. Run pipes and power lines to adjacent city. Save and exit to region.

Build in the adjacent city a small town with its own water and power and stuff. Don't worry if it's in the red. Save and exit to region.

Go back to your original city. Sell enough power and water so that your plant/pump is operating at 75% capacity at all times (as your city grows, you will be able to sell less and less to your neighbor.) This eliminates a major source of debt new players seem to acquire.

Now, you're gonna want to build a fire dept, but no police to start. Under 5K people, you shouldn't need it, but fire is MUST. Build a small clinic, set its funding level down to almost nothing (but leave the ambulance funding alone) Repeat for elementary school, and if you want, a library. Ignore garbage for the time being. Completely ignore water treatment, recycling facility, parks, etc. until you're running in the black for several years.

I build all high density, and it seems to work fairly well. There are some, however, who like to start with low density. Either way is fine. Initially, you want to set the residential and industrial fairly far apart. Don't worry about placing clinics amidst the industry or commerce; they stay with residential zones, as do schools and libraryies. Obviously, you want to have complete fire coverage, but don't overlap if you can help it. It doesn't help fires break out less.

Hopefully, your city grows. As your population moves in, you'll have to adjust the clinic, school, and library funding. School attendence comes and goes. If your population booms, then the school attendence will be high for a few years before dropping off and staying low for a while (assuming no new homes are added to the district).

I can usually get a city like this going for about 40K. It usually takes about 20K to get into the black budget wise. Raising the taxes to 8 or 8.5% across the board can help with the initial sting. Once you're making money, it's time to invest in your city with parks, police stations, and garbage. A 3x5 landfill should do the trick for a while.

SC4, more than any other SC game, is about slow expansion, You can't slap up 40K worth of residential zones initially and expect to make money hand over fist. The services are a bitch to contend with, but micromangement will win out.

Kind of off topic, but I decided it would be better than making a new topic about a dumb question, anyway...

In SC3k, how the HELL do you stop/cancel/quit out of the stupid parades?!

Badme wrote:Kind of off topic, but I decided it would be better than making a new topic about a dumb question, anyway...

In SC3k, how the HELL do you stop/cancel/quit out of the stupid parades?!

I don't know if you can

Slartibartfast wrote:

Bob McDob wrote:

Slartibartfast wrote:It's only unrealistic if you live in a country where the 2/3rds of the gas prices are subsidized by the government.

It'd be great if you could handle that sort of thing ... micromanage economics, wrestle with the government and stuff. In fact, you could probably make a small SimNation with the regions.

You sorta can, with edicts or whatever they're called... not exactly lower gas prices, but there's one that makes people commute farther. So in fact you're spending government money to help people with their commutes.

I'm talking about a real SimNation ... you'd be able to manage the money supply, establish a court and legal system, pick an economic system and trade with your neighbors. It wouldn't even have to be a big country.

There could also be a Historical mode, where you start in Classical times and slowly build your village up into a town, then a city and a metropolis. Kind of like Civilization or Age of Empires. It would give the game a period flair, as well as create some truly "ancient" cities (as opposed to Simcity, where the basics are pretty much the same whether you're in the year 1900 or 100,191). And there could be a 3-D mode, like Simcity 3000 1.0.

Okay, maybe not ... I'm just frustrated about how "gamey" Simcity is (successful cities are really defined more by the vagarities of the simulator than any sort of logic, leading to bizarre yet highly successful designs), and how very little major improvements have been made to it. Simcity 2000 was truly revolutionary ... zone sizes, all kinds of new buildings and transportation options, arcologies [:~(] Since then, Maxis seems content to just build upon past successes. I understand that they don't want to tamper with a proven formula, and that they also want to maintain Simcity's traditional "city import" feature ... but I can't fight the feeling the franchise is stagnating somewhat. Even with all the spiffy toys in the new expansion pack, in the end, they're just toys. I'd like to see something truly revolutionary.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Your commuters only travel at one mile per hour.

That's right folks. Let me explain my experiment.

I set up a 2x2 zone of dense industrial with a road leading to a 2x2 zone of residential. I started with 10 spaces between the two zones. What popped up were two low income lots with 8 people total, and then an industry that had 9 jobs. This kept the simulation simple. I would then move the residential zone 10 tiles further after recording average commutes.

This is what resulted - with 10 tiles between, there was an average commute time of six minutes. Every 10 tiles further added another six minutes (approximately). By the time it was at 100 tiles we were at 62 minutes.

What does this mean?

Well, Maxis has finally owned up to a truer sense of scale with SC4 (much appreciated). They tell us that a tile is 16 meters (roughly 53 feet) across, as opposed to telling us SC3k's tiles were about 200 feet across. Unfortunately, unrealistic commute times have persevered. 100 tiles is about a mile, and that means your sims are traveling 1 mile per hour.

I was excited when I heard that sims might be willing to travel up to 2.5 hours. Well, that's time spent on about two miles, and it honestly messes with the whole regional idea.

It seems to me that they've never gotten the commute times right. Play SC2K again and you'll see how closely you have to build every zone for anything to survive. SC3K expanded this quite a lot, but is still not realistic. And now this.

It seems to me that they've never gotten the commute times right. Play SC2K again and you'll see how closely you have to build every zone for anything to survive. SC3K expanded this quite a lot, but is still not realistic. And now this.

If I remember correctly in Sim City 2000 your sims would not travel more than 3 tiles to begin a trip. Ie) A residential tile needed to be within 3 tiles of road, rail, bus, etc for a sim to start his trip.


I turned on the Sim mode and watched where my Sims are working. In one of my cities, they actually leave the map to work at a neighbor city. When I looked at the job description it says "Distant Industries" which when I first saw that thought it was the name of the local company.